Played on PS5 in back compat at 60FPS. I did not actually play this game for 50 hours. The in game clock keeps running when you are paused, which I probably did from somewhere between 15-20 hours. That being said, I played it plenty. I played for many hours a year or so ago, and dropped it. But hearing of how good Forbidden West was encouraged me to pick it up and try to finish it, just mainlining the story quests (something I never do, because I like to take my time in games and see everything).

There is almost nothing redeeming about this game. The combat is its strongest suit but eventually devolves into peppering spongy tank enemies with an endless amount of arrows, or fighting ENTIRELY too large of crowds of robot dinos. You can never just travel across the open world, it is littered with enemies at every corner, and they are ALL hostile. This one redeeming quality has many caveats, both listed here and not.

But the truly offensive parts of this game are its traversal, its polish, and its story. The polish is rough. Most cutscenes have extreme pop-in, glitchy audio, poor facial and character animations, and horribly overwritten and trite dialogue.

It's world isn't just archaic, it was put to shame a few days after it came out by Breath of the Wild. Sure, not every open world game needs to have climbing on anything, but truly here it is an open world game for the sake of nothing but being open world. There is no explanation, verticality is rare and gated by hard to see "yellow" climb markers, and trying to get up anywhere higher than sea level is a glitchy mess. The developers did not INTEND for people to actually go to any vantage point or climb. This is clear by the impossibility of scaling any mountain (of which there are many). You will ALWAYS need to go around mountains. Thank God for the fast travel system because every main story quest completed will give you your next objective ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MAP, WITHOUT EXCEPTION. What is the point of such shiny graphics if your interaction with the world is all about picking up piles of crafting materials, over and over again. MOST OF THIS GAME IS ABOUT PICKING UP FUCKING CRAFTING MATERIALS.

Finally, this might be the worst story ever told in a videogame. Just complete gobbeldygook. I am willing to forgive, and even try to enjoy it's basic premise that sounds like it was written by a 12 year old (robots dinosaurs in the post apocalyptic world inhabited by futuristic natives!) but the "mystery" unraveled by playing is so convoluted, so nonsensical, so poorly explained, so filled with nonsense jargon and ridiculous plot elements with no cohesion or connection or explanation, that by the end I was groaning in pain trying to finish it out. There's GAIA, Hades, Alpha Protocol, The Spire, the corruption (WHAT EVEN WAS THIS??) and a whole bunch of other GARBAGE that had no connection. Does Aloy have to make a stupid comments every time I do something?? Much like attack on titan, you can tell this story was written as they were going along, with deus ex machina after machina being shoved in. Not even to mention its awful pacing. Not even to mention the part near the end where you go to the ruins and it's so hard to navigate after finding the journals that I was lost for 20 minutes on two separate occasions). Just truly without redeeming quality (other than the fact that you can turn off most of the awful HUD, and that you can make it be far less offensively hand holdy).

I like most 1st party Sony games but fuck this. It is everything wrong with contemporary game design and studio priorities. I hope the developers learned their lesson when they got made fun of for being archaic when Elden Ring came out. DO BETTER AND QUIT MAKING ART BY COMMITTEE.